10:38 AM PST - Feb. 23, 2004
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my hands are cold this morning. i can tell as i type on my keyboard and the air that whooses between my fingers that i must be getting sick again. great. but at least i'm back in Glendale and my boy is doing well. he's so big now. my wife was showing me video of him from two week ago and his cheeks were so thinned from his last bout with the flu and still he was a happy little guy. i didn't see him get up this morning. he was still in bed, asleep, red plaid pajamas and his chest on infinite loop, rise and fall, like a yo-yo i did not want to stop. and his cheeks were warm, and his eyes were closed, and i could hear him snore every three breaths or so and i pulled the covers over him because i couldn't think of anything else to do. he's at his grandma's now. and i wanted so much to write a poem about him and the trees in Florida, the ones they transplated from California and how they were overrunning the species indigenous to Orlando and how i kept replaying my life over and over again because i wanted to remember my son and all of his one and a half years and how at same time i wanted to fast forward a little, let the skies deepen in their reds so i could be with my son on a baseball field, playing catch or teaching him how to throw a curve ball or maybe jump even further to meet my own granddaughter and teach her how to spit and run and kick some ass but maybe that's why my hands are cold. i saw a picture last night of my grandma taken the Thanksgiving before she died, and how she was there with three of her great- grandkids and how she must have felt: tired, relieved, hungry, achey, wanting to rest or shed the chill she felt so often in her eighty+ years. i never really knew what year she was born, and she wouldn't ever truly say anyway. how she would still play with my son and sing to him, her hands all knotted and worn from arthitis like two tree branches whose last task was to give shade on a hot day or hold fast while a squirrel bounced upwards. and how grandma would just sit sometimes and i'd asked what are you doing? and she'd say i wish your grandfather could see this and how i'd sit and see the scene, frame by frame, as if someday i could replay it all.
